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Tag Archives: Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

While it’s an elementary statement to say that all videogames predominantly communicate with a combination of light and sound, I think Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is of particular note for how it uses these sensations to depict its gameplay and tells its story. When chapters finish, the area goes dark and players are guided to the next by a starscape on the ground; they pulse to the beat of the swelling and suspiciously apropos music. The sound is anything but diegetic, a tapestry of effects and music that intertwine, bombarding me with a feeling of what the area sounded like rather than a specific examination of it. In its best moments, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture becomes an overwhelming combination of visual and auditory effects, but even in its slightest moments it’s a meticulously rendered and curated collection that captures the spirit of Shropshire.

All of this is wrapped up in what, specifically, the Player Character in Rapture is. Who are they, why are they in Shropshire, and most importantly, why are they seeing and hearing the world in this state? Is this the way the world exists now, and any survivors of the “Rapture” would see it as I do, or do I perceive the world this way because this is how the Player Character in particular does? The landscape and the human alterations remain intact, but the people themselves are gone, leaving behind lights which spring to life when I draw near.

And with those words, I got off to an awkward start with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

It helps that I went into Rapture knowing nothing except that it is a so-called “walking simulator” and has developed a reputation as the crème de la crème of high-brow pretentiousness in videogames—right up my street, in other words. I’m also a bit of a paradox when it comes to videogame narratives; I want them to be there, but I also make an effort to see everything else in the gameworld before I pursue them. So as I descended from a hilltop observatory into the quintessentially quaint English village of Yaughton, the name “Jeremy” flashed on the screen and a noisy ball of light flew off to the left. I’ve played enough videogames to know that I was expected to have my curiosity peaked and follow it. Rejecting that, I went right.